


to prove they were not dead

by alreadybroken (lifeofsnark)



Series: Tommy/Lizzie [1]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Abortion, Abortion aftermath, America is a plague, Angst, Arguments, BDSM, Childbirth, Children, Don’t Judge Me, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, I love her, Lizzie needs a hug, Lots of that, Marriage, More or less Canon Compliant, Romance, Rough fucking, Smut, The Author Regrets Nothing, Tommy needs a hug, a surprising amoung of philosophy, also sorry to the Brits for fucking up your dialect, antique bdsm!, don’t say a fucking word about Lizzie, how to find peace in your marriage of convienance in six easy steps, nothing I say, p in v, this started as a five things fic, you need to know about the angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 00:00:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21807820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeofsnark/pseuds/alreadybroken
Summary: Tommy and Lizzie, and all the years that spread between them like no man’s land- impossible to survive, with both of them helpless to retreat.OR:The story that started as a Five Things fic: the lies that Lizzie told herself, and truths Tommy only admitted in the privacy of his head. (In the end there’s one thing they both agreed on: Tommy Shelby has a heart.)
Relationships: Tommy Shelby/Lizzie Stark
Series: Tommy/Lizzie [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1694923
Comments: 82
Kudos: 162





	1. Chapter 1

> Still to the last of crumbling time
> 
> Upon this stone be read
> 
> How many men of England died
> 
> **To prove they were not dead.**

\--GK Chesterton, _For a War Memorial,_ 1922

* * *

So there she was. Alone, skint, and behind on the rent. She’d spent her rent money on the procedure, and if she dwelled too long on it she could still feel the long metal tools moving inside her. 

Lizzie hadn’t finished school; hadn’t gone as far as she thought she could have. Despite her lack of education, this particular bit of maths was easy enough: she didn’t have any money. She didn’t earn enough at the BSA factory to make up what she’d spent on the abortion, and the man who’d messed her up had gone off to be a soldier. 

She didn’t have money. Men did.

Helen helped her. She told her about getting a cheeky peek at the gent to make sure he didn’t have the clap. She told Lizzie about the chalk on her shoes, and how cheap was too cheap, and to start sleeping with a wooden wedge jammed under her door. 

“Had a couple gents remember where I lived,” she said easily as they walked into the Marquis. “Thought they’d pop by for a sample. It’s easier not to tup ‘em at home, but needs must. Now smile.”

Lizzie had smiled. She’d smiled right through the bitter kisses of her first john, and the ugly grunts of her second. She managed to smile for those first four weeks: long enough for her to make up the rent money she’d spent on the abortion, and long enough for her to get laid off from the BSA. 

Lizzie stopped smiling soon enough. 

It didn’t take her long to learn about the johns who liked to watch her gag and choke on their cock. It didn’t take her long to learn that there were men- more than a few- who couldn’t get hard unless she cried. 

So she cried. And she took their money. 

And told herself _I’ll be alright. I’ll get better. I can make it as a whore._

(She lied, and lied, and lied.)

* * *

Brass bells tolled across a devastated French field. 

“S’like a wedding,” John murmured, tipping his face up to the sky. “I could marry the sun. I’d fuck it, I’m so happy to see it. It wouldn’t take much to get me off, neither.”

Arthur cuffed his elbow around John’s neck and tugged his younger brother into him. “You’d burn your cock clean off, lad.”

“I’d be worth it. Worth it for all this blue sky.”

Tommy looked down at his hands, stained nearly black from the dirt, before squinting back up at the sky. The bells were still ringing, the bright sound rolling across a landscape that had been scarred right down to the bedrock. Straight down to the bones.

_Not a wedding,_ he thought, closing his eyes against the glare. _They’re ringing for a funeral._

He included himself in the count of the dead. He’d always known he was going to die in France. He’d made his peace with it. 

Tommy turned to look at his brothers, laughing and shoving on the edge of a trench. A trench that has been a grave for many, and should have been for him as well. The sun was shining, weak and welcome. Around him men were laughing and crying and cheering, his brothers were alive, and he felt nothing. 

Nothing at all. 

He always knew he was going to die in France. Only thing he hadn’t counted on was his body living on without him. 

* * *

He’d smiled at her. 

Polly had thrown her boys a welcome-home to-do in the Garrison. John was drunk already, and Arthur was hanging off Tommy’s shoulders, spilling whiskey down his own shirt and laughing. They’d both hugged her, Arthur and John. 

She tried not to care that they hugged her like they didn’t know. Like they didn’t understand what she did, now. It didn’t matter that she’d rogered half the men in the room; that when the Shelby boys had left for the war she’d been a good-enough girl, and now they were home and she was fallen. John had even kissed her, though it didn’t mean much. He’d kissed every last woman in the room. 

She smiled and laughed and sat on her bar stool on the far corner. It was worth it to hear the laughter again, to see people coming back to life after a too-long war. Ada came and sat with her a bit, and Polly made sure to speak to her in front of the other soldiers’ wives. Polly always had a kind word for her these days. 

And then Tommy came. 

“Miss Lizzie,” he said, and his voice was deeper than she remembered; his eyes more pale. “Buy you a drink?

~~~

When he kissed her in the alley, he tasted like hell. (He tasted like sulphur and smoke and despair.)

He smoked like the burning cigarettes could wash away the taste of deep-down French dirt, like the tobacco could help him forget the acidic taste of panic and fear. Maybe it would. 

She knew that she tasted like Birmingham mild, so she licked into his mouth to chase his hell away. His eyes were bright when he took her by the hand and they ran through the streets like kids. Lizzie was buzzed on the drink and drunk off Tommy Shelby’s attention because for this one night, just now, she was a normal woman. She could let herself believe the illusion of it: she’s still a nice girl who met a boy at the pub and decided to take him home, all giddy and lit up inside. 

He kissed her as soon as they were through the door, his hands scrabbling at her buttons and hers clinging to his shoulders. They didn’t say anything: in the half-light of her hideous little room, there was nothing to say. 

She didn’t need to use the oil-trick when he slid into her. Lizzie was wet all by herself, enthralled with his eerie blue eyes and the squareness of his jaw. His eyes were intense, focused and furrowed, chasing his pleasure like he must have chased the Germans during the war. 

She wouldn’t close her eyes and miss a minute of it. She watched when he shifted to reach a hand between them, his rough fingers finding the nub of her clit and pushing there insistently. It was too much pressure, too much contact, but she came anyway. (Probably more from the idea of someone caring about her pleasure, as opposed to her managing it for others.)

He came right after she did, his back arching and his face pressed into the limp pillow beside her bed. He was quiet in his pleasure, and she stroked the short-shaved hair along the back of his head, enjoying the way it tickled her palms. His hair was soft, softer than she expected anything that was a part of him to be. 

As her skin cooled he shifted, rousing enough to not sprawl across her, and she could hear other revelers singing their way down the lane. She already missed his heat, but happiness was simmering in her blood, keeping her warm. 

_Tommy Shelby._ There had always been something about him.

“I needed that,” he muttered, sitting on the edge of the bed and fishing his trousers off the floor. He pulled a battered carton of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one, still unashamedly naked. 

“Hmm.” She stood and picked her dressing gown off the back of her kitchen chair, bonelessly content. 

He dressed quickly and efficiently, tucking his cigarette into his mouth, holding it between two fingers, or balancing it on the footboard of the bed, taking long drags between articles of clothing. It was an art form: _cigarette juggling,_ she thought to herself, watching him like he was the most fascinating thing in the world. 

And then he took out his wallet and dropped a note on the table, and her joy froze in her throat.

“See you around,” he told her, and then he was gone into the darkness, the wool of his black coat blending into the coal-stained streets and walls of their city. 

Lizzie didn’t cry. There wasn’t any point. But she left that money on her kitchen table long after he’d gone. 

~~~

She knew what to expect after that. He’d seek her out a couple times a month, and he’d fuck her like she was… _herself._ Not some nameless pair of tits he’d captured on an exotic safari. Usually he’d make her come, but he left her hanging just often enough for her to remember that this was her job, and he’d come to _her_ for pleasure, not the other way around. It was a fine way to earn a couple bob, and that was that. She kept her heart out of it as much as she could. 

And then she missed her monthly again. 

~~~ 

When the door cracked open, just enough for her to peek out with one blue-shadowed eye, he could smell the blood. 

That’s all it took to have him shoving into the room, ignoring her little hitched gasp as the opening door pushed her backwards along the rough floor. 

(What did it say about him, that his instinct was to walk towards the scent of pain? What had they done to him, that he ran towards gunshots, instead of away?)

There was a blood-soaked dress curled on the floor, twined between the legs of a slightly crooked wooden chair that had been placed beside her bed. On the seat of the chair was a bottle of whiskey, a small basin, and a crumpled wet rag. 

He thought, _Christ, she’s murdered a john,_ and he was already wondering if she hid the body well enough to escape detection when he finally turned and saw her. 

He was used to seeing bloodied bodies in all their conjugations: dying, dead, gone. Bodies were bodies, warm or cold. There was no modesty left in him, no biological shame left to his name. But this, _oh,_ but this. 

“Lizzie,” he said, and he almost choked on the word. 

She swayed and leaned against the door he’d just come in. “Tommy,” she said, closing her eyes. “Not up to customers today.”

He could see that. He could see the little rusty rivulet of dried blood that had snaked down the inside of her thigh to curl around behind her knee. She was in a short cotton slip, one already yellowed with age, and now stained with yet more blood. She was so pale he wondered how she managed to get to the door at all. If she hadn’t answered, he would have gone away. 

(If she hadn’t answered, he wouldn’t be burdened with this image of her, wouldn’t have to carry the knowledge of her vulnerability.)

“C’mon,” he said, crossing to her and pressing his side to hers, shoulders to hip to thigh. He got one arm around her ribcage and towed her to the bed, which she tipped into with a whimper. 

“Tell me you didn’t fucking do this yourself,” he said, dropping his coat and suit jacket onto her small table. “Christ, Lizzie, you could have died.” 

(She still might.)

“No,” she said, her dark lashes fanned over her obscenely pale cheeks. “Went to Mrs. Ginrod.”

_Last week,_ he thought as he strode down the hall to the shared tenement water line. _I saw her last fucking week._

He filled her kettle with water and returned to the shabby room where Lizzie still breathed. Her legs trailed over the side of the bed at odd angles, as though she didn’t even have the energy to tuck them up under herself on the mattress.

He put the kettle on to boil and took a long look at her, the neighborhood whore he’d been fucking.

“Mrs. Ginrod thinks she’s a witch,” he said. The smell of blood, coppery and dark, still filled the room and it was only through sheer force of will that he didn’t think of France. He picked up her sodden dress (only wet from the waist down, Christ, _Christ_ ), opened the one window in her room, and hurled the dress out to land in the alley beyond. It was no use to her now. He’d buy her another one himself, if he had to. 

“She might be,” said Lizzie, her voice smaller than a whisper.

“She’s cheap,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “And you’re skint. God, Lizzie, she doesn’t even use anaesthetic.” _Half the time she doesn’t even wash the knives_

One brown eye opened, focused on him hazily, and closed again. 

Behind him the kettle started to scream, and he cut off the gas and poured boiling water into the shallow pan at her beside. 

She was light. That’s what he noticed as he shifted her higher onto the bed and pulled the pillows out from under her head. (He remembered his training. Triage ‘em flat; keep the wound above the heart.) For all that she’s long and sturdy, the bones that made up all her angles were fine. 

It was nerves that finally made him start talking. If he was honest with himself (and he tried to be, if he’s honest with anyone it ought to be him) he’d rather be dealing with a bullet wound than a botched abortion. 

“Gonna clean you up. Don’t want you dying of infection, eh?” 

The rag was hot and mostly clean as he wrung it out over the basin. Her skin was soft. 

She jerked a little when he slid it up from the inside of her knee, chasing that terrifying brown-red rivulet. “Hush now,” he told her, and fell back into the patter he used with horses. “M’ just visiting, just tidying up. There’s a girl.” 

He rinsed the rag, let it stay hotter this time, and reached under the skirt of her shift to press the cloth directly to her sex. He didn’t look. He didn’t think he could. 

“Is it worse?” he asked when he noticed the tear rolling down her cheek, crystalline and temporary as frost on a cold French field. 

“No. S’not worse.”

He didn’t ask why she was crying. If it was shame or fear or embarrassment, he’d let her keep it for herself. 

The rag came away red. Fresh, heartsblood red. He rinsed, ignored the way the basin turned red, too. 

“Was it mine?” he asked, pressing the hot rag to her cunt once more. 

“Coulda been.”

He wasn’t sad about the child. He wasn’t fit to be anybody’s father, but he knew Lizzie would be a good mum. She’d love the hell out of her kid.

“I would have given you the money.”

The slightest shake of her head. 

(The rag went in the bin, and he moved on to the next.)

“Lizzie.” With one hand still under her skirt he leaned forward and gripped her chin with the other. Her eyes, clouded with pain and ...something, loss maybe, flickered open to meet his. “If it happens again. If it happens again, you tell me.”

She closed her eyes. “If I go again. She says I’ll die.”

“Then it doesn’t happen again,” he said grimly. He’d seen so much needless, pointless death. He wouldn’t stand by if he could prevent this one as well. 

~~~

After he found her half-dead from Mrs. Ginrod’s ministrations, he only fucked her from behind. 

Lizzie wondered about it, in between (or sometimes during) other johns. She wondered why he couldn’t look her in the face any longer. 

(The answer was always in front of her. She chose to ignore it.)

He’d seen her as a person. He’d witnessed the cost that her livelihood took on her, and it wasn’t something he wanted to face again. If there was anything Tommy Shelby wasn’t, it was weak. 

Apparently he couldn’t abide the appearance of it in others. She wished she could resent him for it. 

(She wished she could resent him at all.)

In the end, the problem wasn’t that he’d seen her as a regular person, vulnerable and hurting. The problem was that _she_ had seen him. She’d felt his hands on her, sure and gentle. She’d seen anger and annoyance in those cold blue eyes; had felt his concern, and she wanted more of it. 

And so she gave proof to her second lie: that she could whore for Tommy Shelby, and not have it change a thing. 

* * *

It started with a tophat and a coconut. 

He was drunk, and lying more or less on Polly’s couch in front of her fire, his legs dangling off the far end. God was a joke, religion was a joke, faith in anything but yourself was a fucking joke, but the Catholics might have been onto something when it came to confession. 

It was like how vomiting made you feel better after too much whiskey. It was an acute kind of relief, one that faded in minutes, but oh, those first few seconds after your body was purged… it might be the closest thing to bliss that a working man could feel.

He wouldn’t darken the door of a church in this lifetime, so he sought out the next best thing to god: he went to Polly Gray. 

She passed the bottle of whiskey back to him and stared into the flames. “You never wanted anything easy,” she said. “It made me wonder about school. I could see… could see your little mind turning, taking it all in. Thought maybe you left because you were bored.”

He shrugged, and hitched his head higher onto the arm of the couch. “Had better things to do.”

“ _Business,_ ” Polly drawled, taking the bottle back from his loose fingers. 

“Careful,” he told her, covering his eyes with one forearm. “That business paid for this house.”

“I _earned_ this house,” she told him, her words as biting as the cheap booze he’d been raised on.

“Yeah,” he said shortly, enjoying the spins, the way everything felt distant and remote. “Yeah, you fucking did.”

For the space of a few slow breaths there was quiet between them. In this respectable neighborhood, with its clean air and haughty neighbors, all they could hear was the crackle of the fire and a lone dog barking in the distance.

“All I’ve wanted… all I’ve ever fucking wanted were things I shouldn’t have.” His words were slow and tunnel-deep, rasped out of a locked part of his dark soul where Tommy never looked. “Fucking… tophat and coconut. Impossible things, things only rich cunts had.”

Polly hummed a noise of affirmation. 

“I thought Grace was …fate,” he said, waving his hand in the air like it would help him find the words. “Like those fucking guns. Fell right into my lap. Fucking destiny, yeah? These things I shouldn’t have that were suddenly mine. And I was gonna keep ‘em.”

“Shoulda known it,” said Polly, more to herself than to Tom. “Your first love was a consumptive. Your second was a spy. You never want things easy.”

Any man could take the easy thing, the low-hanging fucking fruit. Tommy wasn’t any man; never wanted to be. 

“Every time I fucking touched her, Pol. Every time I put these fucking hands on her, it felt like I was giving the fucking finger to the king. Fucking… sticking it to god. Putting my fingerprints on her, smudging her up.”

A pillow _whoomfed_ into his face, and it was a testament to his inebriation that he hadn’t sensed it coming. 

“You can’t own a woman,” Polly said, but her tone was fond. “I raised you better. Fucking prick.”

“I am,” said Tommy, one corner of his mouth tipping up in a reluctant smile. “But I’m your fucking prick.”

“There’ll be others,” said Polly, pressing the bottle back into his hands. He took a swig, and it was a shame he was too drunk to appreciate how fucking much the whiskey cost him. 

“Yep.”

He could buy others, now. Buy any fucking girl he wanted. But if he _could,_ if he could have them that easily, with the drop of a few fucking pound notes, he didn’t fucking want them any more. It was the chase, the knowledge that society would hate him for touching one of their chosen few… Christ, he could get drunk off that alone. Off some cunt’s expensive perfume, and soft hands, and skin that had never seen the fucking sun. Like smearing his come over a stained glass window: sacrilege in a three-piece suit. 

“I saw Lizzie,” said Pol, tilting her face back towards the ceiling. “Said you’d only been fucking whores.”

“Yep.”

“Catch your death like that.”

“Nah. They’re too scared t’ give me the clap.”

“What about Lizzie?”

“What about her?” he asked, ignoring the little flash of vulnerable brown eyes he saw when he heard her name. 

“You could fucking take her out, Tom. She’s loyal. Wouldn’t mess you around.”

“I don’t want Lizzie.”

Polly paused, considering what he’d told her. “Fucking shame,” she said. “She’s a good girl, under it all.”

She was. She was kind and soft and easy. Lizzie was the kind of woman Tommy would have married if he’d been a different man. He’d be a factory bloke, his hands scarred from sheet metal instead of horses and bayonets. She’d be a factory girl still, or some other man’s secretary. 

(Though the likelihood of another man overlooking her history, accent, and fucking atrocious spelling was slim.) 

There’d be babies. He’d love them in that amused, distant way that working fathers did. 

Sprawled on Polly’s couch, numb from the whiskey, he shivered and muttered a Romani charm under his breath. It was too late for that. The version of Tommy Shelby that might have considered that life was sealed inside a forgotten French tunnel, dead and fucking buried. 

He knew he ought to love Lizzie. It would make his life a damn sight easier if he did. But since when had Tommy Shelby wanted anything easy?

Nope, he was a robber-boy at heart: Tommy Shelby only wanted the beautiful, impossible things he was never supposed to have.

* * *

The first time Lizzie realized she was truly, deeply jealous, it wasn’t of Tommy’s new whores. No part of her could be jealous of a whore, not now. Not after the way she’d spent the last eight years. A whore was a creature to be understood and pitied, a product of the world in which they lived. Coal made smoke, poverty bread whores. That was the way the world worked. 

Oh no. Lizzie wasn’t jealous of the girls who now took it up the fanny on Thursday evenings. Cock was cock, even if it was attached to Tommy Shelby. Lizzie was jealous of his _sister,_ and that was so much worse. 

~~~

She was reviewing his diary for the following week when Ada burst through the doors (the same ones that had Tommy’s name printed on them in fancy gold ink.)

“Tommy,” she said, barely glancing at Lizzie. “Emerson, at the fucking docks. He said he won’t deal with ‘the fucking Shelby bint’ when the King of fucking Birmingham could come himself.”

For the last quarter hour Tommy had been fiddling with a fountain pen and shifting his heavy crystal tumbler around the top of his desk. He hadn’t looked at Lizzie directly since she’d walked into the room. He’d answered her questions, and had given her instructions about letters and bills and appointments, but he hadn’t _noticed._

He noticed Ada: her flushed face, the little fists clenched at her side, the bright fury of her eyes. 

Not for the first time, Lizzie thought that if Tommy had been born a girl, he’d be Ada. Under the spoiled baby of the family was a snappy wit and cutting ambition, and it had all been wrapped in a body unlucky enough to have been born a girl. Likely she’d flirted with the communists not out of any class loyalty, but because it was the one place that her brothers didn’t already rule. She could make her own mark, for better or worse. 

“Take a seat, Ada,” said Tommy. 

She sank into the leather chair to Lizzie’s left. Neither of them looked at her, and if she was a good secretary, she’d leave now. (She’d never claimed to be a good secretary.)

“If you tell me that you’re going to give into him, I will smash that bottle over your head _Your fucking Majesty,_ ” she hissed. 

“I’m not going to do what he wants,” said Tommy calmly. “It would set a precedent that whoever wanted to get to me only needs to talk over you.”

“So this is about you- of fucking course it is. Everything’s about you; you’re Tommy Shelby and the world spends at the end of your fucking cock.”

His lips quirked. “You spend a lot of time worrying about what I do with my cock?”

Ada made a high, tea kettle sound, and Lizzie took that as her cue to leave. She told herself that she didn’t pull the door all the way closed because she didn’t want to disturb the siblings. That’s all it was. 

Tommy’s voice was muffled when Lizzie returned to her desk, but she followed the shape of the conversation. Ada would return to Mr. Emerson’s export office with a dozen of Tommy’s men. They would impress upon him the way that things worked in Birmingham: successful business owners jumped when the Shelbys said jump, and looked the other way when the Shelbys said to look the other way. 

Ada was a Shelby, and nobody should ever forget that. 

Lizzie toyed with the office accounts, tallying up petty cash and trying not to reply the way Tommy’s eyes focused on Ada, alert and wide and focused. She wanted him to look at her like that, wanted-

Ada came out the office door more calmly than she’d gone in it. 

“Hey-” Tommy caught her arm as she headed for the door, her dark, lipsticked mouth pursed. “C’mere. I’m proud of you, yeah?” He pulled her into a hug and dug his chin into her shoulder, resting dark crown against dark crown. 

“Proud of what?” asked Ada, and Lizzie looked down at her ledger and tried to become invisible. The other woman had probably meant to question to come out as something more than a whisper. 

“You,” said Tommy. “Doing more than your other fucking brothers, that’s for damn sure.”

Ada laughed, and Tommy stepped back, cuffing Ada on the shoulder. “Ring me after.”

Ada rolled her eyes and marched to the door. “Yes, mum,” she called, and then she was gone. 

Tommy stared at the closed door for a few long moments, his jaw set and his eyes focused on something far beyond the horizon. Slowly, methodically he found his cigarettes and lit one, smoking it almost absentmindedly. Then he turned to her, his eyes still thoughtful. 

“Fucking women,” he mumbled, looking up at the ceiling. “Women.”

Lizzie wondered if she was included in that all-purpose denouement.

~~~

Mrs. May Carleton. Widow-lady of a Knight of the fucking Realm, heiress, and horse-woman. 

In short, everything Tommy had ever wanted in a woman, wrapped up in a soft, perfumed little package. 

“He doesn’t even fucking love her.”

When she’d taken the job with Tommy, she’d showed up at 8 o’clock that Monday morning to find a bottle of aged Irish whiskey sitting on her desk. 

“What’s this?” she asked, looking at the big, heavy desk and shiny new typewriter. 

“Put it in your drawer,” said Tommy, walking by her into his cave (office). “Working for me, you’re gonna need it.”

She’d saved it. She hadn’t been sure what she’d been saving it for, but she trusted her instincts. 

Lizzie was glad she had. 

“Love who?”

Lizzie blinked over at Esme, her eyes narrowed. “Mrs. May Carleton,” she said, mimicking the pretty Queen’s English she’d heard on the other end of the phone. “His horse trainer. Why are you here?”

“Looking for John,” said Esme, taking a seat across from Lizzie. “Why’re you still ‘ere?”

“Feels as much like home as anywhere," said Lizzie, and then glanced at her bottle of whiskey. She might be more drunk than she thought.

When Lizzie tipped the bottle towards Esme in question, the other woman waved her off. “John keeps telling me to lay off the drinking. Says it isn’t good for the baby but you know, I’ve met his fucking babies. I’m raising four of ‘em, and the little fuckers are impossible to kill.”

She took a little blue vial out of her pocket and tapped the powder out onto the back of her hand. “Never said nothing about Tokyo,” she added after she’d snuffed it up.

Lizzie grinned. The non-Shelby who’d married into the family was just as fierce as they were.

“Tell me about this horse woman,” said Esme, tipping her chair back onto two legs. 

Lizzie sighed and swirled the bottle. “He’s fucking her,” she said. 

Esme didn’t need to ask who ‘he’ was.

“So? He fucks everything. Probably his cock’ll fall off.” Her expression turned sly. “If you come out with me tonight, and we sleep under the sky, we could _make_ his cock fall off.”

“He’s probably immune,” said Lizzie morosely. “Witchcraft would probably only fucking… make him stronger.”

Esme shrugged. “’s possible. But why do you _care_ that he’s fucking her? You’ve fucked him, haven’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Lizzie, taking another gulp of her drink. She’d had an idea, just as Esme had come walking in…

“He’s fucking her.”

“You’ve said,” said Esme dryly. 

“But he doesn’t love her, either,” said Lizzie. “But he… plays with her. Flirts. Dinners and drinks.”

“Boyfriend experience,” said Esme, nodding. “A pretty game about it. You were a workin’ girl, you know how it is.”

Lizzie scoffed. “Tommy has nothing in common with whores.”

“Nah,” said Esme, looking up at the ceiling. “Just- a game, like. Seeing if he _can_ get her.”

“And her cunt’s the prize,” said Lizzie, raising a silent toast in the quiet of the office. 

“Always seems to be,” said Esme. “Nothing motivates ‘em like meat, money, or quim.”

Lizzie slumped a little further into her seat. “Something new will,” she said quietly. “Something ...unattainable. Impossible.”

She knew how the male breeding organ thought. She was intimately familiar with it. 

“Nothing for it, then,” said Esme, bringing the front legs of her chair down again with a bang. “You need something new too. Need to get out of here. New place, new cock, new stars.”

She looked morose, and her foot was bouncing against the floor, _taptaptap._ Lizzie wondered what it was like to wander for you whole life, free and loved, and then to suddenly be trapped within the same four miles of Small fucking Heath. 

(She wondered how it would work in reverse: she’d never been outside Birmingham. How would she do as a wanderer?)

“I don’t want cock,” said Lizzie, closing her eyes against the gentle turning of the room.

“Then what are you all worked up for?”

Lizzie shrugged. 

She didn’t want Tommy’s cock. She wanted his _kindness._

Lizzie went back to work on Monday. She greeted Tommy when he greeted her, and she kept her eyes fixed resolutely on her papers, caught in her third lie: there had never been any way that she could work with Tommy day in and day out and not get jealous. 

(Third time unlucky.)

* * *

“Knew I was a bad bet as a husband.”

Smoke from the fire swirled up to mingle with the stars, carrying with it the ashes of his hopes and dreams. 

“Tried to tell you. Knew you weren’t meant for a man like me. Fucking… world couldn’t let it stand. Couldn’t let it fucking stand, ‘cause a man like me should never have touched a woman like you.”

He took a long look at her photo, the one where she’d looked down at Charlie at just the wrong time. Her eyelashes were a blur, but the camera had caught her cheekbones, the dimples of her grin, the familiar line of her jaw. He’d loved it because Grace ...loomed bigger when she was in motion. She schemed and plotted the same way he did, only she wasn’t trying to take over England. She just wanted whatever corner of it he happened to be standing in. 

“S’ my fault. My fucking fault, I promised I’d make you safe-” he trailed off into the keening sound of man who didn’t have enough space inside of him to cry. All of the space inside him, all the gaps between his organs and where any air was supposed to be- it had all been filled with rage and loathing, full up to his throat until he was choking on it. 

“Scariest thing, Grace,” he said, his voice just over a whisper. “Scariest fucking thing, is I didn’t think I could love before I met you.”

He turned his head sharply away from the fire, looking out into the pitch of the night with the afterimage of flames curling like pretty blonde hair burned into his eyes. 

“Thought something snapped in me, in France. Me and my family. That could be my world, that could be my whole fucking world. Everything else… like ghosts. Like I was seeing their ghosts, even though they weren’t dead yet.”

He took one last look at the photograph, at the familiar set of her shoulders and the curve of her smile. Slowly, ceremonially, he fed it into the fire. 

“We never talked about- the end. My brothers know what to do when the devil finally finds me, but- I didn’t know about you.”

How did he tell her that they held her funeral in the same church where he’d married her? 

One month. He’d had her to have and to hold for _one. fucking. month._

He gritted his teeth and swallowed hard, his throat working. “This is what Pol’s people do. My parents’ people. Burn their belongings and forgive the departed. But Grace-”

One fist beat at the soil beside him; he didn’t feel the pain when his skin split. “Grace, I don’t have anything to forgive you for, not a fucking thing, and when I finally die, for fucking good, I know I’m going to a place even lower than hell, because you’ll never forgive me. And you shouldn’t.”

He breathed heavily, like a horse straining at the start of a race, ready to run until it had outpaced its opponents or its heart burst in the effort. Whichever came first. 

Unsteadily, Tommy reached into the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a length of silk, which glinted dully in the flickering light of the fire. He held it to his nose and breathed in deeply. Her pillowcase smelled like her perfume, like her shampoo, like the salt of her skin. 

It smelled like late nights when he’d creep into the room like the robber boy he was; feeling her body unconsciously curl to his like a flower towards the warm fucking sun. 

It smelled like indolent Saturday mornings when he could take Grace apart, touch by touch and pant by pant, when his mouth and fingers would spend the rest of the day tasting like her. 

It smelled like love. It smelled like something he’d never have again. 

He fed the silk into the fire, too. 

“Nobody could accuse me of being a one-woman man,” he said, his tone even. “A creature of discretion I am not. But I can tell you this: if I couldn’t be a husband to you, I can’t be a husband to anyone. I loved you until I was mad with it, and even that didn’t fucking help me.”

He shifted, lying down parallel to the fire with his face tipped up to the stars. “Polly warned me. Said I’d never find a good girl to settle for me, because women don’t like being fucking ordered about. Don’t like being controlled, and Grace… I need control. I fucking need it, more than food, or water, or fucking… anything.”

He listened to the fire crackle and his horse stamp at the end of its tether. 

“I always knew I was a bad fucking bet as a husband.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! This is the chapter for which All Tagged Warnings Apply. Be sure to review them if you're particularly squeamish. (It's nothing worse than we see in the show.) Onward, dear readers!

Lizzie stopped swaying her way down the carpeted hallway as another pain spread around her back and low, swollen belly. She knew she was in labor, knew her baby would be born that night or, god help her, the following day. But the pains were still intermittent, and her waters hadn’t broken, so for this little sliver of time, her labor remained between her and her daughter. 

She pressed one hand to her side as she peeked into the nursery room again. She’d finished it weeks ago: the cradle where Charlie had slept, the soft toys, the rocker, the trailing little spinner of stars. 

“Soon,” she whispered to her child as another pain took her. “Soon.”

The room already smelled like baby, somehow. Like sturdy cotton nappies and talcum powder. 

Now, with her labor staring her in the face like a barrel of a gun, Lizzie could admit that she’d had three reasons for keeping this baby:

The first was simple. If she had another abortion she’d likely die. 

The second: she wanted someone to love. Someone who wouldn’t push her love away, or turn it bitter, or make her feel like a fool for offering it. She could love this child with everything that was in her, and still have affection to spare. 

The third… the third was Tommy Shelby. She’d see him this way, see him holding their daughter in his arms, see his softer smiles and gentle hands. She was like… like the moon, she decided. If she couldn’t have the sun, she’d at least reflect his light. 

Another pain came, even sharper now. Soon her baby would go from stirrings and kicks to a whole little person, out in the world. Lizzie would have to share her smiles and coos and squirms, but she could hold her at least, this little being she already loved so much.

~~~

She hadn’t asked him where he’d be, when her baby came. 

Lizzie had asked him about Charlie. “I don’t want him to hear,” she said quietly, looking down at her toast. Even seven months in, it was all she could keep down in the mornings. “It would frighten him.”

“I’ll take him to Ada’s,” he said, not looking up from his paper. “Have Mary tell me when.”

Word had come that evening, and he’d driven Charlie down to Ada’s place. 

“Well you’re not staying,” she said when he’d pulled out a book. 

“Why not?”

She crossed the room and yanked on his arm. “You are not going to let the mother of your child labor away while you drink whiskey an hour afuckingway.”

“They can call when it’s done,” he said, not taking in any of the words on the page he was looking at. “We have telephones now, Ada.”

She slapped a palm over his book and stuck her face towards his. “And what will you do from here if things go wrong,” she hissed. 

“The same thing I could do there. It’s in god’s hands, now.”

The book was yanked from his hand, and Tommy shut his eyes, wondering why he’d been plagued with a demon in the form of his younger sister. 

“You listen to me, you great fool of a man. She may not be the wife you wanted. You might only have married her as a part of one of your plots. But you chose to plant that baby in her, and you should see it through to the end. Be a fucking man.”

He told her he was going to his office. 

In the end he went home. (He could work from there just as easily.)

As dawn began to heather the sky outside, and still no word had come down from Lizzie’s bedroom, Tommy went looking for someone. 

“Mary,” he called, seeing her familiar form retreating down through the kitchens. “How is she?”

Mary turned and waited for her to catch up with him, her apron clenched in her hands. “First babies take longer,” she said

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Mrs. Simeon isn’t worried yet,” she said. 

_ Yet  _ hung in the air between them like deadly German gas. 

_ She chose this,  _ he reminded himself as he returned to his desk.  _ She chose the baby, chose to marry me-  _

There wasn’t any fucking point in trying to blame her for this. He’d fucked her just as surely as she’d fucked him, and at least she’d done him the courtesy of being fully fucking present. She was right, in his head he had been fucking a long-dead Italian girl. 

She’d been fucking him, because she always was fucking him, because he’d seen love shining out of her eyes since fucking ‘18. 

He’d traded on that love. Had taken her to the derby and whored her on it, had made her the executive of his estate and bet his wealth on it, had told her the secrets of his business and staked his family’s lives on it. 

And now here he sat: resigned, resentful, and fearful for her in a fond, remote kind of way. The way he might feel about a favored, laboring mare. And so, the morning ticked on. 

He’d heard plenty of screaming during the war. Bellows of rage, cries of fear, shrieks of agony. In his dreams he could hear the squeals of wounded horses, confused and innocent of all warmongering thoughts.

None of those sounds prepared him for the noises that filled his great big house. At first her shrieks raised the hair on the back of his neck and he was thankful all over again that Arthur had taken him out back to camp in the field on the night that Charlie was born. 

At midday Mary appeared with a cheese sandwich and worry etched into the lines around her mouth. 

“How is she?” he asked again, pacing in the space behind his desk. 

“Coming along, Mr. Shelby,” said Mary, her eyes tight and brows furrowed.

“Is there anything- a doctor we can send for?”

“Mrs. Simeon rang for a doctor a quarter of an hour ago.”

He didn’t kick the desk. He already had his staff scared enough. “Next time- tell me. I want to know.”

“Yessir. But the doctor- he isn’t coming. He’s attending another birth, sir, and-”

_ This was why,  _ he thought as he watched Mary’s lips move.  _ This was why Ada sent him home.  _

He made the calls, made the threats, made the appropriate bribes. And when the doctor came, Tommy followed him right up the stairs and into Lizzie’s room. 

~~~

The light was fading, and it looked like it was taking Lizzie with it. 

“You shouldn’t be in here,” said Mrs. Simeon with a tremendous frown. 

Tommy ignored her, crouching down at the edge of the bed by Lizzie’s shoulders. He took her hand and she looked at him, her dark eyes hazed by pain and exhaustion. “There’s a girl,” he said. “Ready to have this baby yet?”

She groaned and curled in on herself, and Tommy did his best to pay no attention to the grey-mustached man crouching between her thighs. 

“Tommy,” she said, gritting her teeth and bearing down again. 

“I’m here,” he said, his heart jolting when he saw that she’d burst a blood vessel in one of her eyes. “Right here.”

“If you’re staying, get behind her and brace her up,” said the doctor, glancing over at Tommy. 

He had a thousand questions, and apparently the time in which he could have asked them had run out. 

He stripped off his jacket and waistcoat and tailor-made shirt. Lizzie was at war right now, fighting with death himself, and never let it be fucking said that Tom Shelby shied away from a fight. 

His first impression was the  _ heat  _ of her. She felt like she was burning up with fever; like she should be out of her mind with hallucinations and dreams. His second realization was that she was laboring with every fucking muscle in her body, every fucking one clenching and releasing like a great, invisible fist was trying to crush her to death. 

“You have to push, Mrs. Shelby, and Mr. Shelby, you push with her.”

It was like shelling. Relentless and impossible and he wanted to destroy everything all over again. He didn’t know how long it lasted, he only knew that when his daughter mewled her first cry, Lizzie was nearly unconscious, the bed was bloody, and the moon was high in the sky. 

He lowered Lizzie down to the bed as Frances cleaned off their daughter and the doctor fussed between her legs. “Tom,” she said, her lips colorless. 

“Yeah, sweetheart. We have a girl. You did it, Lizzie. You did it.”

_ So much death,  _ he’d said.  _ So much death. All he’d wanted was some life.  _

“Try and love her. Even though it wasn’t Grace. Please.”

Two pieces of knowledge, icy and sharp, dawned on Tommy at the exact same time. She thought she was dying, and she assumed he’d, what? Abandon his daughter because she had the wrong mother?

_ Yeah, and what fucking reason did you give her to believe any different?  _

Mary bustled up with a bowl of water and a sponge, and Tommy yanked them from her. He swiped sweat from Lizzie’s face and tried to meet her bloodshot eyes, but her blinks were getting slower and slower. 

“Passed the afterbirth,” he heard the doctor say, and it seemed to come from a long way away. 

“Hey- Lizzie, hey, hey, look at me. Pretty Lizzie, c’mon, there’s a girl. There you are. I already love that fucking baby. No, look at me. She’s a Shelby. She’s mine, and I’ll kill for her. Yeah? Safe as houses with me.”

Someone tugged at his elbow and he shook them off. This was  _ important.  _ This mattered in a way that very few things did these days. 

“Mr. Shelby!” 

He turned towards the voice with a snarl, and was met instead by a blanket-wrapped baby being thrust against his chest. He took her, his body remembering the motions even if his head didn’t. 

“Look, Lizzie,” he said, cupping little Ruby’s head so she could peer down at her mum. “A little you and me.”

Lizzie smiled, and one last tear trickled down from the corner of her eye. 

“Hey- Lizzie-”

“She’s asleep, Mr. Shelby,” said the doctor, placing a heavy hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “Or unconscious. Come out of the room and let the ladies tend her.”

Only half-aware of what was happening, Tommy followed the doctor out of Lizzie’s room, his daughter still clutched to his chest. She was scrunched and red like every newborn he’d ever seen, and yet he could feel everything tilting away from him again. 

This was going to change things. A baby always did.

~~~

“Here.” He dropped a heavy brown folder into her lap. 

“What’s this?” she asked, shifting Ruby a little as Tommy sat beside her on the bed, one of his arms looped around her shoulders and his other hand gently, reverently, stroking Ruby’s downy head with the back of his fingers. 

It was one of her favorite things about him, this easy way he touched people. He’d clap his brothers on the arm or cup their faces in his hands if he needed their undivided attention. He had hugs and strokes for Ada, and Polly… well Polly didn’t seem to like being touched by anyone. Tommy hugged and kissed and tickled his son, and Lizzie wanted that for her daughter, too. (Never mind that she wished she could take some of that easy comfort for herself as well.)

Tommy flipped the folder open, and Lizzie peered over the nursing baby to see what he’d brought her. “It’s-”

“My will,” he said, and Lizzie tried to concentrate on what he was saying, this was clearly important, but she was so tired and she hurt so much and he was trailing his fingers over the skin of her shoulder with the tips of his fingers and it was so hard to  _ think.  _

“Last Will and Testament,” he said. 

“Is something-”

“No, nothing’s wrong,” he said, his voice low and smooth and easy like it was when he talked to horses, or to babies. “Just… keeping a promise.”

He’d said that before, and it had been about appeasing some dead girl’s ghost.

“Here,” he said, and tapped a point on the page. “Right here.”

Lizzie squinted down. “A trust… for Ruby,” she said slowly. “Just like Charles, and- and Karl.”

“Yeah,” he said softly. “She’s set. Whole rest of her life.”

Lizzie shifted Ruby over, self-consciously tucking one breast away, but Tommy didn’t move from her. He just kept stroking her, kept himself pressed against her from shoulder to hip. He was so  _ warm;  _ had always been so warm, and Lizzie had spent the two days since Ruby’s birth wondering if she’d ever stop shivering. 

When Ruby had settled, her tiny mouth sleepily wrapped around a nipple, Tommy tapped the papers again. “Look. Everything else- all goes to you.”

“Wait- but-”

“I trust you,” he said, and flipped the folder closed, dropping it onto the bedside table. “How’s our lass?”

“Strong,” said Lizzie with a smile. His dancing fingers were hypnotizing her, tempting her to close her eyes and lean into the bulwark strength of him. 

Ruby fell asleep with a tiny sigh, and Lizzie caught the trickle of milk that rolled down her breast with the tip of a finger. 

“C’mon, share now,” said Tommy, expertly picking up the sleeping baby and transferring her to his shoulder, the opposite of the one against which Lizzie now leaned. “There we go. Shelby girls. Lucky man, me.”

Lizzie let her eyes fall shut. She could feel the taps and pats Tommy was giving the baby, working the air from her little system, and she’d never been so fucking thankful for Charlie in her life. Tommy had done this once before: one of them should fucking know what they were doing. 

“Why?” she asked, word slurred on a yawn. “The will- why now?”

Tommy dropped an absent-minded kiss to her hair. “You asked me,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “You asked me to try and love her. You remember?”

She remembered thinking it; remembered lying awake at night with kicks and jabs whirling in her stomach while she worried that she’d be the only one to love this baby. She didn’t remember asking. 

Lizzie shook her head, and Tommy trailed his knuckles down her cheek and over her neck. 

“You asked that I love her, even though she’s yours,” he said quietly. 

Lizzie turned her face away from him. 

“Come back,” he said, pressing her back towards him. When she was looking at him, uncomfortable and embarrassed, he nodded. “I want you to know, Lizzie Shelby, that I’m not going to turn from this girl.”

She thrilled at being called a Shelby. She thrilled at the idea of  _ family,  _ his and hers and theirs. 

“And you and me…” 

She held her breath, waiting to see what he’d say.

“We’ll rub along well enough.”

Well. She shouldn’t have expected more, should she. Babies changed everything, but not- not that much. 

* * *

In the end, he was just like his father. 

He could hear Charlie playing in the hall, the rapid thump of little feet on the expensive runner. Lizzie and Ruby were watching from the drawing room; two sets of identical dark eyes. 

His father was always leaving them, him and his mother and siblings- Shelby Sr. spent his life chasing after questionable business ventures and beautiful women. Tom crunched over the neatly raked gravel of his drive, swinging up into his Bentley. 

The only difference between him and his father was that Tommy Shelby invested in better businesses and seduced more refined women. 

As he turned onto the road back to Birmingham it occurred to him, in an abstract way, that maybe his kids would grow up to hate him, too. Oh, they’d never be barefoot and hungry, not the way he’d been, but-

He didn’t think much about his childhood. It had been dark and small, but he’d always had someone around, even if he hadn’t always wanted them there. They’d been like a litter of puppies, the Watery Lane gypsy mutts. Him and Arthur and John and Freddie, always falling over each other, getting into scraps and trouble and feuds. Maybe it was why he lasted in the war, in the tunnels. He was used to sharing a bed, sharing food, sharing space with someone else. 

Did his children have that? His children with the nannies that were paid to care for them? 

He hadn’t gone a day in his life without someone reaching out to touch him. Him, in his shonky shop clothes and the haircut that Pol gave them all on the first Sunday of every month.

He could only  _ wonder  _ if Charlie and Ruby would hate him. There was hope there yet, every parent’s hope: that their kids would grow up to be better than they were. 

What killed him was the hope he saw in Lizzie’s eyes, that same stubborn hope that had been there since before the war, since her own whore mother had died in her bed. She’d clung to it: through serving men on her back, through the whispers, through Tommy selling her to a soldier and Tommy refusing to marry until just before their baby was born. 

When his brothers (brother) looked at him, it was usually puzzlement he saw in their eyes. Sometimes it was fear too, or respect. Ada always made him feel that much bigger than he was, that much smarter. He’d been the brother who’d always guessed which boy she’d been pining for, or the trinket she most wanted for Christmas. She’d made him feel like a god long before the rest of his aspirations had grown so grand. 

And Aunt Pol- she still looked at him like the little boy she’d cuff around the ears. Maybe that’s why he was always able to talk with her: she saw the man he really was, and the boy he’d once been. 

But Lizzie- sweet, happy Lizzie. 

For as long as he’d known her, Lizzie had wanted only a few simple things: a sturdy door to put between herself and a world of men. Dresses that fit her properly, that wouldn’t shame her in front of the other women. She’d wanted honest work. 

And she wanted a family. 

He’d given her all of those things. She could live in his house (her house, too), where the aged oak door could keep out anyone too stupid to ignore the name Shelby. She had dresses custom made for her, dresses that had never been on a single person before her. He’d given her a job, he’d given her a baby. 

Even now, morose and jiving for a cigarette, he could admit that life had been unfair to their poor Lizzie Stark, and that she’d always done her best with what she’d had. She’d been the one to teach herself to type, she’d been the one to take that secretarial class. No matter how rough (men) life was with her, she kept fucking hoping. 

Just like his own mother had. 

That’s how Finn had come to be. Shelby Sr. had come back to Small Heath with smiles and songs, and his mum had opened her heart and legs one more time. She’d watch out the curtains sometimes on fine spring mornings. She’d have this… soft look about her eyes, like she was looking inwards at happy and secret things only she could see. 

Lizzie looked at him like that. He didn’t love her, he knew he didn’t love her, and god help her, he was going to have to find a way to stop her from loving him. Loving him would ruin her fucking life, just like his da had done to his mum, and there was just enough of the old Tommy Shelby left to keep that from happening. 

~~~

He couldn’t be subtle. He’d been quietly and consistently reminding Lizzie that he didn’t love her for, Christ, for a fucking decade. No, he was going to have to break her heart all at once, decisively, shattered into so many pieces that she’d never put it back into his hands again. 

(So many nights, over so many years, her laugh and smile and easy sharing of warmth had been the only thing keeping his heart from breaking. And now, to return the favor, he was going to crush hers.)

Nobody suspected her of anything, least of all him. In a world where his family had become accustomed to wealth and power and fear, it was in Lizzie’s face that he found normalcy. He could still see her wonder sometimes, when he dropped her allowance onto her desk, or when she visited his office. He still felt the instinct to smile when he caught her running her fingers over the soft, fine wool of her long winter coat. 

She put up with him not for the money or the fame, the way his family did. No, she tolerated him- his whoring, his anger, his disdain for her- because, to the core, she’s loyal. 

He saved her. He knew it, she knew it, and he ruthlessly traded on that understanding. It was mutually acknowledged and unspoken: had he not given her the job as his secretary, she’d have the clap by now, or be hooked on little white tablets, or be in her grave, dead at a rough john’s hands. 

Maybe that was why, when he heard  _ they say it isn’t good for the baby,  _ his first registered emotion was betrayal. He was shocked in a way that he wouldn’t be with any other woman because this was Lizzie, and Lizzie wouldn’t do anything to hurt him. She was the strange type of creature that could be kicked, over and over and over again, and still sidle up to you, looking for warmth. It wasn’t that she was stupid. 

No, Lizzie wasn’t stupid. She was something worse than that. 

Lizzie Stark  _ survived.  _ She endured, the same way he did. 

(Maybe that was another reason why he couldn’t love her, when for every logical reason, he should. They were too alike, under the skin.)

Even now, she hoped. Even now, she endured, her pride held tightly around her. She wanted to be included so badly, wanted him to give her  _ reasons _ for his wanders,  _ reasons _ for his rages,  _ reasons _ that he was buying more and more of the little brown bottles of dope. 

He had a thousand reasons, and he had none. Death was simpler than living, and yet he had everything left to live for. 

“Do you want food?” she asked him. 

“No.” After sleep, food had been the next thing his body had stopped wanting. 

“You read the letter?”

“Yep. It would help if you could fucking spell.”

He hadn’t had to plan this conversation. He’d always been able to read her, local Lizzie Stark. He’d always known what buttons to press. She’d always been transparent, his Lizzie. Her own, now, maybe, based on what she’d written about the solicitors.

“Left school too early,” she said, blowing out a stream of smoke. 

It had been a glancing blow, a test of his opponent’s defenses. She didn’t blink at that, and part of him wanted to nod in approval. She’d gone hard, Lizzie had. (His fault. Mea culpa.)

“You wanna fuck?”

She didn’t let him see if that blow had landed either, but it was a solid shot. He always brought it back around to fucking, with her. A little reminder that that was all they’d ever had. 

“Thought not.”

“You’ve got calls?” she asked, tapping ash into the cut tray on his desk. 

“Yeah.”

She told him about Ruby’s birthday. He listened, and felt nothing. Just the jagged emptiness of midwinter. Absently he thought that yes, all children were afraid of their father, just like Catholics feared god. (It was right to fear power.)

What he said next… he could blame it on his exhaustion, maybe, or the opium he more and more frequently swallowed down. He should have let her walk away, should have accepted that she could have the last word. He’d have had the divorce that way, and his house would have been quieter, things would have been simpler. 

“They apologize for the noise… for the sounds, and the dust, and the mud and all that fucking blood. And it’s- it doesn’t make sense, when they say it. I don’t know why they’re apologizing, because the noise is better than the fucking silence. You get used to the noise.”

( _ Echoes of words from a long time ago, whispered to a horse long dead: it’s just noise. It’s just fucking noise, trombones and tubas turning up. You get used to it. _ )

“So they apologize, and you say no, don’t be sorry. Don’t be sorry, because it’s all you can fucking do now.”  _ Yep.  _ Like a racehorse taken away from the track. He’d been taken out of the war, and yet fighting was all he could fucking do.

Tommy glanced up, remembered who he was talking to. 

“Want me to write it down? Want me to put it in a letter?”

Her fingers tightened on the edge of the door, and that one little motion gave her away. He’d win, tonight. Win this fight and break her fucking heart. 

“Arthur and I can’t put it in a letter. They haven’t invented the words, the fucking words we would need. We could have stayed in school. Yeah. But we volunteered. And still don’t have the fucking words.”

And then Lizzie surprised him for the first time that night. She called him on his shit, right out on the carpet like a fucking schoolboy. “Should you choose to depart, either by your own hand or someone else’s, I will be left in charge. So I’d like it if there was something left.”

Ah, and there it was. The perfect fucking opening for the last blow he’d need. He turned away from her and looked sightlessly out the window and into the night, not quite willing to watch her face as he did this. 

“Well,” he said. “In my head I still pay you for it. So good luck with me, then.”

She’d fed him the line of her own destruction years ago- a decade, now. She’d asked him, just once, not to pay her. To treat her like an ordinary girl. To this day it was one of the only things she’d asked him for for herself. 

And he’d thrown it right back into her face, with interest. 

The door to his office clicked closed. 

Yeah, he thought, swallowing down the rest of his whiskey. He was a bastard, just like his father.

* * *

It was a baptism of bruises. 

Lizzie had assumed she’d known everything a body could know about the way things went between men and women. She knew what got them off, the little signs that they were going to come, every flavor of a working man’s fetish. She hadn’t participated in every last kind of bedroom sin, but one way or another, she knew they existed. 

She knew about men who liked to see their women submit, who liked to see a woman’s skin redden in pain. She’d taken her share of spankings, but that was as far as she’d let it go. Lizzie had been a meat-and-potatoes kind of whore: study and wholesome. She let other girls handle more exotic requests. Up until the night of  _ mine, my property, nobody touches what’s mine,  _ Tommy had been a fairly conventional kind of lover. 

He’d always had an uncanny way of marching her right up to her boundaries and pressing her there, right at the edge of discomfort. Before, bent over her desk, she’d had a matched pair of bruises that never faded. The edge of her heavy desk had been sharp and sturdy, and the fleshy part of her thighs had been pressed against it with such regularity that two perfectly straight bruises slashed across her legs. 

He’d never pushed her farther than she was willing to go, but he always pushed her to the precipice, always reminded her that he wouldn’t force her, wouldn’t cross that final line, but that rules or no,  _ he  _ was the one in charge of the way they fucked. 

It hadn’t bothered her as much as it probably should have, but that was her whole fucking life where Tommy Shelby was concerned. He could get away with things that would be unforgivable for other men. He was Tommy fucking Shelby.

He’d always touched her with confidence, with the adroit hands of a man used to handling both horses and hand grenades, children and pick-axes, women and guns. He touched her with assurance every single time, he always had. His fingers always reassured her, even as he pulled her hair or yanked at her skirt or pressed too hard, too fast, too much. 

(Lizzie wondered where he’d learned it. From the horses, probably, and that was a lowering thought.)

That had all changed on the night of  _ mine, my property, nobody touches what’s mine.  _ She’d thought she could fuck him the way Tommy really wanted to fuck without it changing things, and she’d been wrong all over again. 

Around her the house was still and dark. The imported silk of her slip was soft against her skin, and it whispered as she shifted, uncrossing and recrossing her legs as she sat on the bench at the end of their ( _ their,  _ shared, jesus) bed. 

Gravel crunched in the driveway and Lizzie held her breath, waiting for the sound of the front door to close, and footsteps to jog up the stairs. 

She listened, her skin shivering to be touched, as the quick steps of his brogues traveled down the hallway. He passed their door, he always did. Charlie’s room was first, and then a few more steps- little Ruby, and the maid who slept on a cot. 

She could feel her heartbeat accelerating as he retraced his steps. The heavy brass knob to their room turned, and Lizzie was transfixed by the motion. 

He walked into the room trailed by a cold draft from the hall, frigid air eddying around him like fog on a cold winter’s night. His gloves were off, his working man’s hands on display for her to see, and the hat he hung on the back of their door was free of razor blades. 

She didn’t ask him how his day was. He hated the question. 

He didn’t ask about hers. She’d tell him if she had something to report, just as surely as she would have had she still been his secretary. 

He stopped a few feet away from her, backlit by one of the beautiful glass-shaded lamps that sat on a sideboard, his eyes trailing over her face, her breasts, her long, crossed legs. 

"Very nice,” he said, tossing his coat over the opposite end of her padded bench. “Take it off.”

Lizzie stood, her nerves and anticipation slowing to a simmer. Tommy was here, his presence filling up the room the same way god filled a sanctuary: in shadows and echoes and the minds of his believers. They faced each other as they undressed, expensive cotton and silk and wool falling to the floor like so many soldiers on a dark French field.

Tommy stopped undressing when he was down to his fine wool trousers, suspenders, and nothing else. Amber light highlighted the planes and divots of his body as he left her standing before the bed, nude and cold, while he crossed to the sideboard and poured himself a drink. 

He didn’t ask if she wanted one, and she knew he wouldn’t. That’s not what these nights were about. 

Still ignoring her, Tommy crossed the room to the small desk that stood in the corner, circled around behind it, and took a seat. He was slouched back in the chair, his knees open and his arms relaxed by his sides, one hand loosely wrapped around the crystal tumbler. He was the picture of male indolence; a king assessing all he surveyed. 

He jerked his head, his eyes locked on hers. 

“Come here, Lizzie.” His voice was quiet: all the better for conveying threats. 

Lizzie crossed the room to stand before the desk. He tipped his head back and cocked it, looking up at her like she was a horse he might buy; an object available for him to purchase. 

“You were waiting for me.”

“Yes.” She swallowed, that small motion betraying her nerves. A rejection here, now… it was something she wasn’t sure she could face. 

“So you liked what we did?”

She nodded, dropping her gaze from his eyes to his chest, to the sunbeam tattoo. 

“Tell me.”

“I liked what we did.”

She glanced back up at his face, so sharp and angular and familiar. 

“I wondered if you were waiting for me to apologize,” he said, taking a sip of whiskey. “They way you’ve been looking at me in the mornings.”

Lizzie huffed a soundless laugh. “You never apologize.”

“I know,” he said, still looking at her as though she was a particularly tricky crossword clue. “And you know. So if we do this… I won’t apologize for it, either.”

She nodded, and he mimicked the gesture, nodding slowly in turn. “I’ll stop, if you ask me.”

He always had. 

“But no… I won’t apologize.” 

Lizzie took in a deep breath and let it out in a rush, carried along by her words. “Please tell me if you don’t want to do this, if this is something you’ll resent me for later. It’s -this is the thing you can’t throw back in my face.”

The unspoken admission was that everything else not only  _ could  _ be hurled back at her in resentment, she half-expected that it  _ would. _

Something shifted in Tommy’s eyes. It wasn’t a physical change; his eyes neither tightened nor widened, his expression didn’t flicker. But it had been there, like the way you glimpse a fish through water on a bright summer day: the suggestion of motion, the gleam of scales, and then it was gone again, with the surface of the pond unchanged. 

“Come here,” he said, and his voice was lower now. He tapped the space between his chair and his desk with his bare toes. 

Lizzie rounded the desk and stood between his knees, trying to keep from crossing her arms across her stomach and breasts. She felt more exposed now than she ever had before. 

He put a hand on each of her hips, his fingers tight enough to dent her flesh, but not quite hard enough to bruise. “I want this,” he said, his eyes locked on hers. His voice was tight: his planning voice, the one he used when he revealed the tactical card hand that he’d been painstakingly constructing. “I’ve wanted it so fucking bad since that night.”

“With me?” asked Lizzie, half skeptical.. 

“With you,” he confirmed, one eyebrow raising as he let her jealousy slide past.

“And since you want it too,” he added, kneading her waist. “You can get on your knees and suck my cock.”

Lizzie shivered and nodded, dropping to her knees in front of him. He made no move to help her as she fiddled with the buttons of his trousers, and he was silent when she freed his cock from his trousers and pants. 

She was hyper aware of him at first, and painfully self-conscious. She knew it was an ungainly act: the bobbing head, the spit, the obscene stretch of her lips. It was likely why Tommy had picked it. She concentrated on the feel of him on her tongue, growing even harder with every determined caress. There was a rhythm to it, the coordination of fist and tongue and breath, and she fell back into it easily enough. 

Tommy, ever canny, must have sensed her attention starting to wander. He threaded his fingers through her hair, stroking lightly before fisting it tightly, yanking at the roots. He stood, his desk chair scraping backwards, and he used her hair like a leash to keep her against him. Now she was kneeling in his shadow, and he was looking down at her like an Old Testament god; one of the ones who had Views about fornication and bastard children. 

Lizzie kept moving, kept taking him into her mouth and over her tongue, her fist wrapped around the base of his cock where her mouth couldn’t comfortably go. She had to pull against the grip of her hair to do it, pain prickling across her scalp like pins, and it kept her anchored in the here-and-now with him: an ache in her jaw, pain in her scalp and knees, and Tommy. Everywhere, Tommy. 

With the hand not holding her hair, Tommy unwrapped her fingers from his cock and placed her hand on his thigh, pressing his own fingers over hers in an unspoken order.  _ Leave them there.  _

Now there was nothing stopping him from fucking into her mouth in earnest. 

“Deep breaths, Lizzie girl,” he said, rocking his hips against her shallowly, warning her what was to come. 

She tried to relax, tried to lose herself in the sensations of the moment. This was Tommy, and he was good at this. They found a rhythm of fucking and breathing, and Lizzie glanced up at him, this god she was servicing. His jaw was set and his eyes were hot, and he chose that moment to cup the back of her skull and hold her in place as he slid his cock into her fucking throat. 

She gagged, and he backed away for only a second before pressing in again. He was telling her with everything but his voice that he’d have her like this, so relax into it now. 

She breathed through her nose and swallowed convulsively around him, ignoring the way gag-induced tears were welling in his eyes. 

When Lizzie peeked back up at him again he looked pleased, with one corner of his mouth tipped up in a smirk. He pressed in again, trapping her between his body and his hand, and she gagged a little as her nose was pressed against the coarse, soapy-smelling hair at the base of his cock. She shivered, just once, her mind finally settling. This was what she wanted. This was what  _ he  _ wanted: he knew what would happen, when it would happen. All she had to do was listen, and everything would be alright. 

“Good,” he said, his voice rasping over the single word. Tommy cupped her chin and pulled away from her, looking seriously down at her once more. “On the bed.”

She scrambled up and clumsily climbed onto their tall bed, her feet gone to pins and needles. He swatted her on the arse as she moved by, and she jumped, her skin so sensitive and shivering to be touched. 

“On your back,” he said, and for a giddy moment Lizzie had to stop herself from laughing. Whatever happened in her life, she always seemed to end up here: on her back for Tommy Shelby. 

He tugged the pillows off the bed and tossed them to the floor, circling like a lion at the walls of his cage. Lizzie wasn’t sure what he wanted from her, so she sat on her side of the bed with her knees together and loosely drawn towards her body. 

“Flat,” he said, those blue eyes so focused on hers, and she dropped back like a specimen waiting for his examination. 

He stood beside the bed and trailed two fingers up one thigh, over her hips and belly, between her breasts, and down the wing of one haughty clavicle. He wrapped his fingers around her wrist and tugged one arm over her head, and then the other. Almost without thought her fingers wrapped around the intricately carved headboard, and he nodded. “Keep them there.”

She was humming now, like a radio antenna tuned to Tommy’s private frequency. She was composed only of anticipation, but beneath that… beneath that there was a level of serenity. This was Tom- he knew what he was doing. 

“Close your eyes.”

She closed them, and now Lizzie could feel herself shaking, her nerves drawn to the snapping point. Something was going to happen, at any time something was going to happen, and she didn’t know  _ what. _

She jumped when he touched the upper curve of one breast, his fingers butterfly-light. Those strong, blunt fingertips trailed all over her skin, leaving goosebumps and tingles in their wake. They meandered over her belly and the soft creases where her body met thigh. His fingers danced over her shoulders, slid along her collarbones, and lingered at her breasts, his skin creating the most maddening friction on hers. 

She was clutching at the headboard in an effort not to reach out and touch him, to pull him onto her. He’d been circling her left nipple, around and around, without actually touching the tightened bud of it, and she thought-

Lizzie yelped and twisted instinctively away from the pain. The heat could only have been from his mouth, the pain only from his teeth. He’d bitten her nipple, the one he’d been sensitizing with his fingers. 

“Shhh,” he said, low and smooth. His voice was belied by his hands, which rolled her back towards him. He started up with the fingertips again, seemingly endlessly fascinated by the way her skin shivered and puckered wherever he touched. Maybe that was it, the ultimate in biological control. He didn’t have to hurt her to elicit a reaction: no, all Tommy Shelby had to do was touch her. Just the lightest touch, and her skin sang for him. 

He whorled his fingers around her navel and over her sides, and Lizzie had just begun to relax again when he bit her, hard, just over the jut of one hip. He didn’t release her as quickly this time; his teeth stayed pressed to her flesh as his hands held her still. 

It hurt, but it ...didn’t. The pinch of his teeth had begun to echo the pounding need in that achey, empty place between her legs, the only part of her he hadn’t touched. 

In quick succession he twisted one nipple and bit the curve of her other breast, and then spent a long time tracing patterns on her all over again. Lizzie still had her eyes closed, and Tommy still randomly hurt her, changing the tempo and pattern and intensity of his pinches and bites and swats. And always, in between, the drag of his fingers over her skin. 

At some point she’d pressed her thighs together, desperate for some kind of friction, but entirely fallen under the spell wrought by Tommy’s caresses. When he yanked on her pubic hair and growled, “Open,” she didn’t hesitate to obey. 

He seduced her cunt the same way he’d seduced the rest of her: his fingers grazed over every part of her, and every so often he’d pinch her labia, or tug too hard on a curl, or let the edge of one fingernail graze over her clit. 

Lizzie wasn’t thinking anymore, not at this point. She didn’t care that little hitches and sobs and moans were pouring from her mouth like prayers, she didn’t care that Tommy was staring at that most hidden part of her body, she wasn’t aware of anything except for his hands on her body and his scent in her nose. 

The air shifted when he moved away from her, and Lizzie whimpered before his weight was pressing the mattress down by her knees: he was kneeling between her thighs, and she could feel herself getting even wetter in anticipation. 

The mattress bobbed, and she held her breath. She could feel warmth radiating off of him; even in the dead of winter he was warm, and-

And he kissed her. Delicately, gently, invitingly, the way a soldier might kiss his girl when he came back from a war. Lizzie had had too few kisses in her line of work, and the ones she usually received from Tommy were ...friendly kisses. Presses of his mouth to her hair or cheek usually.  _ Those  _ kisses were about as passionate as kisses given to visiting aunties. 

But this kiss? 

He’d already seduced her body. Now he was tormenting whatever was left of her mind. 

He pulled back, and Lizzie leaned up to follow him. She heard the ghost of a chuckle and let her head fall back onto the mattress, drunk off everything he was doing to her. 

Tommy’s hands were back on her again, mapping her breasts and belly and ribs. They were heavy and warm against her, and god help her, Lizzie was going to crave being petted like this for the rest of her miserable life-

He slapped her cunt, the pads of his fingers smacking over her clit and cunt-lips with shocking, blooming pain. She shouted, started, and jolted again when Tommy pressed against her, one of his heavy hands over her mouth. 

“Don’t think Mary needs to see this,” he whispered, his voice smoke-rough and sin-dark. “Hush.”

He slid off her again, and Lizzie felt cold without his heat and weight. One hand held her hip as the other winnowed through her folds, nearly frictionless with how slick she’d become. 

“You know,” he said almost conversationally. “I wondered if you really wanted this. You and me, we’ve been fucking for a long time. You never liked it rougher than a yank of your hair.”

One finger dipped inside her, stroking inside her velvety heat. Lizzie’s cunt clenched around it; every one of her senses painfully attuned to the man still kneeling between her thighs. He added another finger. 

“So I wondered,” he continued, “If this was something you wanted to… to fucking prove to me. Or maybe to yourself. That you could give me this, this thing that you knew I wanted.”

In one impossible, predatory movement he was over her again, one hand at her cunt and the other planted beside her head, holding him up. “Open your eyes, Lizzie Shelby,” he said, and she did, blinking up into the face of the man who owned her, heart and soul. 

He looked otherworldly, a traveler come to take her to Faerie. His eyes were in shadow, the jut of his cheekbones were sharp, and Lizzie didn’t care if this was what sent her to hell: for this she’d go gladly. 

He ran his fingers over her cunt before thrusting back in again, the knuckles of his hand thumping against her cuntlips like a dagger hilt. “You can’t fake this,” he said, his eyes dilated nearly back, his grin moon-bright. “You’re fucking soaked for me, Lizzie girl,” he said. “You can’t fake this.”

She jolted as he added a third finger, the stretch stinging so sweetly. 

“You want this,” he said, lowering his face so close to hers that his breath feathered over her lips. “You want my marks on you, want me to tell you what to fucking do and when to fucking come.”

Lizzie shivered again, as unable to look away from him as she was to fly. “I do,” she whispered. She did, she wanted him so badly. He wriggled his fingers inside of her and she squirmed again, still clinging to the headboard. 

“I know,” he whispered. 

Tommy slid his fingers from her and wiped them on her thigh, sticky and warm. If she’d still had space to think she might have blushed, but every fiber of her being was focused on his cock as it slid gently up and down her sex. 

“So fucking wet,” he mutterd to himself, and then he slid home.

For a second, for one long, suspended moment that played out without sound or time or sense, she and Tommy locked eyes, sharing an expression of mutual satisfaction and surprise. 

This wasn’t a fuck over the desk in the counting house. This wasn’t sharing warmth with a conveinant body. This was  _ other,  _ this was timeless and eldritch, a consummation from the time when fires burned out under the stars and drums beat a primal tattoo in the darkness. 

After a second, after a lifetime, the moment passed. They were Tommy and Lizzie again, back in their bed in the big quiet house. 

Tommy braced himself over her, his lips still quirked, and set to his work. Lizzie rocked up to meet his hips, desperately wanting  _ more  _ as much as she was able to want anything. The world had narrowed to this: his cock in her cunt, his breath against her skin, his eyes on hers. All she had to do was hang on and feel. 

Feel the only cock she’d ever truly wanted moving in and out of her, marking her as used from the inside out. 

Feel Tommy pressed against her, all that coiled rage and restraint focused on her. 

Feel the man she’d loved in silent desperation fucking her into their marriage bed. 

“Please,” she whispered. “Tommy, please.”

He froze above her, one eyebrow slowly rising. 

“What- Tom, no,” said Lizzie, her hips desperately chasing his as he slid out of her.

He tsked, his eyes bright and gleeful. “When I say, Lizzie,” he whispered, his lips brushing over her ear. “When  _ I  _ say.”

She twisted from side to side, trying to ignore the throbbing of her clit and the ache in her shoulders. “Tommy, c’mon, I-”

His hand slipped over her mouth, and hazed brown eyes met clear blues. “Hush.”

He stayed like that, with one palm pressed over her mouth, until he deigned to return his cock to its proper pace. He didn’t rush it, didn’t slide into her so quickly that all she could feel was the impact. No, Tom pushed into her slow and steady: leisurely enough for her to feel every glorious inch, and hard enough that she could feel herself rocking against the bed when his hips were flush with hers. 

Once more he drove her up, worked into her until Lizzie’s stomach muscles were clenched and trembling in anticipation and her legs were wrapped tightly around his waist, one heel digging into the flesh of his arse.

This time, he warned her. “Don’t fucking say anything,” he said, nodding a little when she met his eyes. 

And then he left her empty all over again. 

At some point she’d started crying. She wasn’t sure when, because she wasn’t scared and wasn’t sad and wasn’t particularly hurt. She just felt full… full of fizz, like a shaken bottle of champagne. Filled to the top with sensation, with no place for it all to go. 

“Sweetheart,” said Tommy, kneeling over her. He wiped away a few tears with his thumb, his expression devastatingly open and soft. “Of all the fucking things I’ve done to you. Of all the things, this is what makes you cry.” 

She sniffled and turned her face away from him, but he tilted it back. “I like these tears,” he said matter-of-factly. “I earned them.”

She nodded, feeling almost like a child, and he nodded back. 

“Need me?” he asked, already nudging against her entrance again, not waiting for confirmation. 

“Yes,” she whispered as he slid home. “Yes.”

She could tell this time was different. His body was more tense, and he slid one arm under her back to cup her shoulder, holding her tight to him. His hips still moved steadily, but just a bit faster, just enough to give away his own desperation. 

But what killed her was the hand that he slid between their bellies to circle at her clit. 

She keened, a high, animal sound, and bucked against him. 

“Don’t you dare fucking finish,” he snarled. “Look at me- fucking look at me.”

She looked, tried to focus on those bright, familiar eyes when every cell of her body was attuned to the man working between her legs. 

“You wait, Lizzie Shelby,” he said through a clenched jaw. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

“Tom-  _ Tom-”  _

He pinched her clit and she started crying in earnest, so overwhelmed and overcome and  _ owned.  _

“Christ, god- alright Lizzie, alright. Look at me, sweetheart.”

She opened her eyes and looked up at him. His face was distorted by her tears, but she could see the shadow under his jaw and the hooded, pleasure-blown eyes. “Alright sweetheart, alright, come on now, come-”

She did. She shook with it, her back bowed and her mouth open for a breath that didn’t seem to come. Tommy grunted and pressed his face into her neck, his breath hot and damp on her skin. 

“Fuck,” he mumbled, and never before had the curse sounded so much like a prayer. 

They were pressed heart-to-heart, each organ pounding like they wanted to meet in person. 

Lizzie was floating, blissed, drunk on pain and pleasure and Tommy. (Her husband. Her  _ husband. _ )

Eventually he pushed off her and she made a small sound of complaint. 

“Shh,” he crooned, prying her numb fingers from the headboard and bringing her arms down to her sides. Her shoulders hurt. Her shoulders really  _ hurt,  _ like she’d been dangling from the side of a cliff for an hour. 

“I know,” said Tommy in that low horse-patter voice. “You did good, so good. Get you cleaned up, yeah. Stay there.”

Lizzie closed her eyes and floated along, half-aware of Tommy moving around the room. He came back with a sheepish expression and a cold cloth, which he pressed to her cunt. 

“Found myself looking for the horse liniment,” he confessed, looking appealingly boyish, even scarred and naked and grey. “Didn’t want to ride you hard and put you away wet.”

“Think I’ll take it as a compliment,” mumbled Lizzie, still floating along on a gentle sea of sensation. 

“It is,” said Tommy, refolding the washcloth and pressing it to her sex again. “I once told Charlie Strong that I was a horse.”

He roused her enough to press a glass of water into her hands and send her into the toilet to take care of business. When she came back out he’d changed the cover on their bed and was reclined against the pillows like a king, his round spectacles perched on his nose and a folder on his bedside table. 

Lizzie was still naked, still buzzing, but enough of herself to feel shy about what they’d just done. He’d seen her sick, he’d seen her jealous, he’d seen her in her birthing bed, but those had been… elemental, acts of god type of things. She’d  _ chosen  _ this, chose to give him her body and tears. He’d seen the wanton, desperate create she was, had always been. 

She slipped under the covers with her eyes on her lap, and was reassured when Tommy clicked off the lamp and rolled to her, tucking her securely into the curve of his body. It had amused her, in quiet and contented moments- even though he was a bit shorter than she was, she always felt small and feminine and safe in his arms. 

(Some nights, rarely, she’d feel him jolt awake from a dream. He’d turn from her then, as though he couldn’t believe where he was and what he was feeling, and so she’d roll to him and press herself,long and lean, to  _ his  _ back. They never talked about it. He never pushed her away.)

She could feel that he was still awake, just as she was. She wondered if his body was buzzing and tingling, too. 

“Why?” he finally asked, his voice low and rumbling from his chest and into hers. “Why would you let me do that?”

Lizzie wondered what to say. She could give him so many reasons, but only one tasted like the truth. She decided to give it to him. 

“Because-” she took a deep breath and curled even more tightly into herself, physically bracing for whatever he said next. For his part, Tommy only held her more tightly, his fingers digging into her belly. “Because when you’re like that- I know you’re only focused on me. And I can stop worrying.”

His hot breath tickled the hairs on the back of her neck. “Worrying ‘bout what?”

“Everything. All of it. Everything’s  _ better  _ with you, Tom.” It was, and to know that his attention had narrowed to the next place he was going to touch her, bite her, stroke her? To know that for an hour or so his impossible mind was entirely concentrated on her?

She could get drunk off that alone. She couldn’t have his love, but by god she could borrow his mind and body. 

“Why… why do you like it like that?”

He scraped his teeth over the crest of her shoulder and then pressed a soft kiss to the same place. 

“Out there, in the fucking… noise- I’m fighting all the fucking time. Never came home from the fucking war, I just changed it. Changrettas and Lees and fucking Parliament. So many fucking things I have to do, and not a bloody one comes easy. But this…” he stroked along the skin of her stomach up to one breast. “Better than booze and smokes. I can do anything, fucking  _ anything,  _ and you’ll try your hardest to take it. And then- I can hear the bells ringing.”

For a man who’d claimed to not have the words to say what he’d seen and done and felt, Lizzie thought he was awfully poetical. 

“I will,” she whispered. “I want that, too.”

She thought he’d fallen asleep around her when he added, his voice so low and dark, “It’s easier like this, too. To want to hold you, to fucking… drown myself in your smell. Like we earned it.”

It hurt. Everything he did to her and for her hurt, one way or another. But she fell asleep, buoyed along on that one small word:  _ we. _

* * *

He’d lied, with what he’d told Frances. Oh, there was no peace for him in this life, that much was true. But he knew, deep in the black heart of him, that there’d be no peace for him in the next world, either. 

He was perched on the edge of a counter in the kitchen, a crystal glass of whiskey in his hand, his tie loosened from around his throat. It was Ruby’s third birthday, and the Christmas tree was still up in his study. Dirty snow lined the drive outside, and Charlie was eyeing the sugared cake with avarice in his blue eyes. Frances and Mary and the nursery maid were sipping punch and smiling as little Ruby’s eyes went wide with surprised pleasure, cake and frosting sugar smeared over her round cheeks. Lizzie laughed, high and carefree, and Charlie squealed as she set a (neatly cut) chunk of the sweet in front of him. 

“Manners,” she reminded him gently, combing her fingers through his hair as Charlie wielded his tiny child’s fork. 

It felt like the happy scene was happening a long way outside of himself. If he was a normal man he’d enjoy this, he’d be fully present for the joy of his children and the amusement of his beautiful wife. He’d be thankful for the huge house in which they lived, and he wouldn’t keep noticing the corner of a purpled bite-mark peeking out from the shoulder of Lizzie’s dress. 

Oh, he didn’t dislike them, not any of them. He’d already killed to protect Charlie and he’d do it again; would finish what Fawkes started and burn Parliament to the fucking ground if that’s what it took to keep him safe. He’d do the same thing for Ruby, for his perpetually-sunny, dark-eyed daughter. He’d come for Lizzie, too: she’d worked her way inside him, into the tiny corner of his soul that he’d roped off for family. It wasn’t... wasn’t the same as with Grace, but he knew nothing would be. They were different people. It was a different world. 

Absently he watched at Lizzie gently wiped a washcloth over Ruby’s cheeks and in between her tiny, grabbing fingers. His daughter and his wife were smiling at each other, those identical eyes sharing love and secrets between them. 

He watched as Lizzie turned and did the same for Charlie, laughing as he playfully turned his head from side to side, making a game of dodging the cloth. She was good with kids, John was right. It didn’t seem to bother her that Charlie was Grace’s, or that he was the Shelby son. She played with him just the way she did with Ruby, and he wished- he fucking wished- he could love her the way she deserved. 

He was done trying to stop her from loving him. It was too fucking painful for everyone involved. (And though she didn’t know it, this birthday of Ruby’s was so much better than the one that had come before, with black cat dreams, and talk of divorce, and the fuck-up in Parliament.)

Without saying a word he pressed kisses to the baby-fine hair of his children and then stole one from his wife as well, tasting sweet orange and chocolate on her lips. 

“Be safe,” she told him, the way she always did. (He could count on her for that, as he could for so many other things. She didn’t want him for his money, wasn’t counting down the days until one of their enemies killed him for good. She just wanted him for himself.)

As the laughter of his children rang in his ears, Tommy walked out into the dark of the night, anticipation humming in his blood. He didn’t deserve peace, not now, not ever. If he couldn’t enjoy the family he’d worked so hard to protect, if he couldn’t stop moving because he never knew who might be catching up, he’d have to keep moving forever. For this life, the one that came after, and any more lives after that. 

_ No _ , he thought as the car rumbled to life beneath him.  _ Tommy Shelby would never know peace. _


	3. Chapter 3

Things changed. (They always do.) 

Lizzie woke to find Thomas sitting behind the little desk in the corner of their bedroom, watching her. Not intently, not in an angry way. He had his spectacles on his nose and a book in his hand, and the morning light caught on the brass rim of the glasses and the grey hair at his temples. He looked… relaxed, almost. As relaxed as Tommy Shelby could. 

She didn’t sit up, not immediately. She was content to stay curled in her warm bed, where she’d never fucked anyone but Thomas, and look at him. 

He was still beautiful. Handsome was too tame a word for him, it always had been. Young Michael, he was handsome. John had been handsome. Tommy was beautiful in the same way the winter sea was beautiful: powerful and remote and elemental. His angles were too sharp for conventional beauty, his eyes too bright. But oh, he was wonderful to look at. He always had been. 

“Good morning,” he said quietly, closing the book and setting it on the desk. 

“G’morning,” said Lizzie, her voice low and thick with sleep. 

Tommy crossed the room and hitched a hip onto the mattress, his thigh pressed to her belly. “What did you have planned for the day?” he asked. 

Lizzie squinched her eyes shut and rolled onto her back, the sheet twisting around her. “I- ah, we’re interviewing for a new maid today. And Charlie has his violin lesson at half three, and I meant to ask you about a new coat for Ruby.”

Tommy slid a hand under the sheet and stroked the softness of Lizzie’s thigh. It was a thoroughly distracting sensation. “Don’t need to ask me about new coats and shoes,” he said. “You know that.”

She must not have stopped her face from twitching. 

“What?” he asked, lightly squeezing her leg. 

“I guess- she’s so little. Too small for the classes with Charlie, and… I tell you these things so you’ll know she’s growing. Growing and learning, and won’t be a baby forever.”

Her voice had strengthened by the end of her speech, and her eyes were locked on Tommy’s. She could be fierce for her child. (Her  _ children,  _ by now Charlie was hers, too. Just as this house, a living memorial for Tommy’s first wife, was Lizzie’s.)

Tommy stroked her skin and nodded. “I understand,” he said. “What if I took her? Run her into London with me. Day out with Dad.”

“But- Parliament-”

“Ada could see to her,” said Tommy, his fingers sliding along the inside of her thigh.

Lizzie blinked, and then smiled at him. “I’d like that,” she said. “I don’t want- I don’t want her to be afraid of you. Everything- everything else aside, you’re a good father.” She was having trouble thinking: those wandering fingers of his had slid higher, winnowing through her cunt. 

“I half raised Ada, you know,” said Tommy, his eyes distant and fingers circling. “Once, before the war…”

One corner of his mouth turned up, and Lizzie almost stopped breathing. She didn’t want to do anything to break this moment, to stop Tommy from sharing even this tiny piece of himself. 

“Once, I was the one she’d come to when she broke a finger, or accidentally shot Polly’s vase when she was chasing rats with a revolver. I shared fucking everything with Arthur and John. Don’t think I put on a new pair of shoes before I joined the fucking army, but Ada- it felt like she was mine. Fierce little thing with smart eyes, who looked up at me like I could change her world.”

He looked at her, his eyes on hers, and pressed his fingers firmly to her clit, seeming to enjoy watching her arch against the pillows in a pool of morning sun. “Familiar, eh?”

Lizzie nodded and then gasped when Tommy pinched her clit and drew his hand out from the sheet. “When are the maid interviews?”

“Half twelve,” said Lizzie, wet and wanting and confused. 

“Good,” he said, leaning forward to press his lips to her cheek. “Come up here at three. We’ll change, and then go for a drive.”

“Where?” she asked, sitting up to watch as he walked to the door. 

“That,” he said, setting his cap on his head. “Is a surprise.”

~~~

Lizzie went upstairs at five minutes to three, too curious to wait even a minute longer. She could hear Tommy moving about in the lav, and there was a dress laid out over the bed. 

She hadn’t worn it; hadn’t seen it before. It was a deep blue with a peacock feather motif painted over the skirt and hems. One of her old navy bucket hats was on her pillow, and one of Tommy’s grey coats hung on the back of the door. 

“What’s all this?” she called, running a hand down the dress. She recognized the shop tag discreetly pinned to the sleeve: Lowery’s, Small Heath, Birmingham. She hadn’t shopped there in years, not since becoming Tom’s secretary. 

“We’re going out,” he said, stepping into the room, dabbing at his face with a towel. He was shirtless in dark grey trousers, with his suspenders loose around his thighs. “C’mon. Put it on. You’ll have fun.”

She shook her head and did as he asked, tugging her day dress off over her head and sliding into the blended blue. It fit alright- she’d gone years without finding sleeves that were truly long enough for her arms. 

“Very nice,” said Tom, reappearing in a suit that she hadn’t realized he still owned. He’d come to (not so secretly) love custom London tailoring, and this change to their wardrobe had her even more intrigued than Tommy’s secrecy. 

“Where are we  _ going? _ ” she asked, not expecting an answer. Tommy only raised an eyebrow and held out his grey coat for her: apparently her fur-lined coat was off-limits as well. 

(Not that she intended to complain. His coat smelled like him: cigarettes and clover and spicy aftershave.)

They clattered down the stairs, and there Frances waited with Tom’s coat and gloves. The closed car was parked outside with Henry in the driver’s seat and the late afternoon sun gleaming off the shiny black paint. 

“After you,” Tommy said, guiding her into the padded backseat. “Henry, you know where to go.”

~~~

Birmingham. They always ended up back in Birmingham. 

Lizzie had been content to watch the fields roll away as the sun faded, red and glorious, behind the rolling stone walls and hedges of England. Tom’s arm was around her, and for once he wasn’t reading or pacing or (at least outwardly) plotting. 

Henry pulled to the curb a few blocks north of Watery Lane. “Where are we  _ going _ ?” Lizzie asked as she hopped onto the soot-stained sidewalk. 

Tom ignored her and stuck his head back into the car. “Remember where to get us? Alright then.”

And the car was gone. 

He grinned at her frustration, really truly  _ grinned,  _ and passed her his lit cigarette. “Why, Mrs. Shelby,” he said, voice full of the devil. “Did you forget it’s our anniversary?” 

She had. So... four years ago today she’d stood in the registers’ office and had promised herself to Tom Shelby, OBE. 

His smile turned predatory when she didn’t answer. “Ah, so you did. Even better then. Come on.”

He took her hand and tugged her through familiar sooty streets. 

“Should I apologize?” she asked, trailing after him like a kite in the breeze. 

“Never,” he said. 

They passed shop doors and tenement buildings, and Lizzie wondered how much of this Tommy owned. Most of it, she’d guess. 

They turned a corner and she started to hear music: the thump of drums and the high wail of a trumpet or clarinet. “There used to be a laundry here,” she said, staring at the door. It read  _ The Meridian Club.  _

“There was,” said Tommy, pushing open the door and leading her inside. 

A wave of noise hit her: the stomp of shoes against the wood floor, the wail of a trumpet and reedy cry of a clarinet, the pounding of drums and the ringing of an upright piano. And above it all the roar of conversation and laughter and life, lived for just this moment right here and now. 

Tommy tipped the coat boy and tugged his overcoat from her shoulders. “Well, come on then,” he said, tugging her towards the floor. 

“What- Tommy,  _ why? _ ” she asked as he towed her along the edge of the dance floor. 

He turned and stepped close, his hands at her waist, his fingers bunching the cheap material of her dress. 

“Tonight you’re Lizzie, who grew up in a one-room flat on Harwick Street. I’m just a Watery Lane gypsy. Just us, none of the other shit. You and me. Ordinary people.”

( _ Just once I wish you wouldn’t pay me. Like we were ordinary people. _ )

“And because it’s nice,” he added, leaning forward until his forehead rested against hers. “And I can afford it.”

She’d told him that. She’d said that, and he remembered.

Lizzie closed her eyes and swallowed hard. He was going to pretend, for her. He was giving this to her for one night, like a cursed princess from a fairy story. He’d pretend the war hadn’t happened, she’d pretend the whoring hadn’t; that for one long winter night they were the versions of themselves that died long ago. 

“Lizzie-” one broad hand cupped her jaw. “We don’t have to. We can go.”

She opened her eyes and tried not to cry, tried not to ruin this with emotion she knew he didn’t want. “I want to dance,” she told him, determined not to ruin this chance. 

“Right,” he said, and caught her hand in his. “Then let’s fucking dance.”

~~~

For the space of the next few hours they were just bodies, intimately familiar. They swayed and spun across the floor, laughing when one of them nearly missed another dancer or tripped over their own feet. He plied her with gin, cheap and dry, and she flushed when he pulled her in too close with a hand on her arse. 

He smiled. So did she. 

“Stop,” she finally said as he spun her again, her laughter trailing out in the air like ribbons. “Stop, I need air.”

“Alright,” he said, already cutting a path to the door. “I need a fucking smoke.”

They retrieved their coats and stepped outside into the cold, thick air of Birmingham. Her ears were ringing, and she wasn’t totally steady in her old boots as Tommy fished his cigarette case from his pocket and offered one to her. 

“When was the last time you danced like that?” she asked, leaning against the dirty brick wall. The first burning drag of her cigarette didn’t make the spins stop, but it slowed them down. 

“I don’t fucking know,” said Tommy, scuffing at the ground with the sole of his shoe. “Can’t fucking remember.” He glanced up at the sky and then over at her. “But for tonight- we’ll say I took you out after the baby was born. Your first night out, right. Ada came up, brought Karl. You were drunk, three drinks in, and we fell asleep as soon as we got back home.”

She could picture it- her reluctance to leave their little rowhouse without the baby. Tommy’s insistence, jollying her along. The way the drinks would go right to her head, along with the music, and the exhaustion that only new parents could understand.

“I think I am drunk, three drinks in,” she told him ruefully. 

“Fine by me,” he told her, his smile a gleam in the dark. 

They walked slowly down the blocks towards Watery Lane, sharing another cigarette back and forth between them. This neighborhood was steeped in memory for both of them: some of it good, most of it bad. Only a bit of it shared. 

They passed the alley where a john had knocked Lizzie’s head so hard against the wall that she’d blacked out and come to again whilst propped against a bin with his hand on her tit. She’d been so… abstractly afraid, then. Afraid of all the right things for all the wrong reasons. 

She looked away from the alley and pressed herself closer to Tommy, who looped an arm around her waist. Lizzie wouldn’t ruin this with memory or self-pity, so she bumped her shoulder into Tommy’s and smiled over at him. “So, Mr. Shelby,” she asked. “Are you a B.S.A. man?”

Tommy clicked his tongue thoughtfully. “Nah. Still a bookmaker, me. Probably one of the only men in England who was furious when he grew too tall to be a jockey. It’s always been the horses.”

_ It still was,  _ Lizzie thought. The stable was still where he went when he wanted to be left alone with his thoughts. 

“What about you, Mrs. Shelby?” he asked, cocking his head. “Home with all the neighbor kids? Taking in mending?”

“Still a factory girl,” she decided. “I pick the babies up from Pol’s on the way home. We have fish on Sundays… and you have a little gin still in the hall closet. We unlock it when the kids go up.”

He grinned at her, her bootlegging robber boy.

“Everything we need,” he said, tilting his head to momentarily rest it against hers. 

_ Not anymore.  _ But for tonight, they would pretend. 

Watery Lane was quiet, but it would be now, wouldn’t it? The people who remained here were hardworking, mostly poor people who went to bed early and rose even earlier. Besides- half the houses were empty, living memorials to people whose luck had changed. Arthur’s house, Tommy’s house, John’s house. The bookmaker’s shop was dark, the doors bolted and reinforced. 

Lizzie had always found it almost sweet that the Shelbys hadn’t been able to completely walk away from Watery Lane. These dusty rooms waited for them: cramped and dirty, smelling like stale smoke and memories. 

Tommy led her past the shop and stopped at the next door. He fished an old iron key from his pocket and the lock opened easily, as though Tommy had only been gone for a day. Before she could step inside he grinned and put one shoulder into her belly, sweeping her off her feet and over his back. 

“Tommy,” she gasped, dizzy and laughing as he kicked the door shut behind them. 

“Never did this properly,” he said, heading for the stairs. 

“Don’t think this is proper, either,” she wheezed as his shoulder knocked the air from her. 

“Ah, well,” he said, and she thrilled at the smile in her voice. “I’m a gypsy lad, me. We’re known for stealing women.”

He dropped her onto his old bed and she laughed, her arms spread wide. The room was spinning as all the blood drained down from her head, and Tommy braced himself over her, his lips tipped into a smile. 

“Happy anniversary, Mrs. Shelby,” he told her, pressing his mouth gently to hers. 

She ran her hand over the short, soft hair at the back of his head. “Happy anniversary,” she whispered.

He levered up from her and pulled Lizzie after him. They undressed slowly, their arms and hands tangling as they reached for each other’s buttons and ties and clips. It wasn’t rushed, wasn’t a show. Just two married people, two friends of long acquaintance, stripping their armor away. 

“I want you,” said Tommy, pushing her down onto the bed. “I want  _ you, _ ” he repeated, bracing himself over her. 

(For once, she believed him.)

The kiss… it almost made up for the pain he’d put her through. It was leisurely, like he was savoring her mouth the way he would one last cigarette; like they were kids out by the canal with nothing to do but kiss the night away. 

“Tom,” she murmured, arching against him, running her hands down his scarred and freckled back. 

“Hush,” he whispered against her skin, his lips investigating the soft shadows under her jaw. “Hush.”

She did. With whispers and sighs Tommy left her shivering on the covers of his old, swaybacked bed with love bites beginning to bloom under her skin. Her hands ran all over him: his chest, his arms, his arse, his cock. He pushed her away from that, pressing a kiss to her palm in a soft moment that left Lizzie absolutely devastated. 

He pulled her up to sit with her thighs wide and dangling over his, both of them shuddering as she slid home, reveling in the joining. They couldn’t rush like this; could only rock together, as close as any two people could be. She had one arm wrapped around his shoulders and the other in his hair, keeping his face tipped up to hers. 

It was heady, loving him like this. He didn’t take his eyes off her, didn’t look away. His mouth was slightly parted and she bent to kiss him, arching back so that his shoulders would support her weight as she ground her clit into his pubic bone. 

“Just like that,” he rasped, looking up at her with wide-blown eyes. “Just fucking like that.”

She nodded, and didn’t take her eyes off of him. Sweat sheened over their bodies, and she didn’t care, didn’t care about anything but his cock in her cunt, his eyes on her face, and her body in his arms. This was all they needed, the two of them. 

They’d always been shit with words, but their bodies? It was a language in which they both were fluent. She could doodle love-words over the scars of his back. He could suck blooming flowers to color her skin. She could say  _ I love you  _ with the arch of her back and the shiver of her skin. He could tell her  _ I know,  _ with the scrape of his teeth and the weight of his blunt hands. They could confess within the sanctity of their sheets, could fight with bared teeth and bruising kisses, could love and love and love. 

Lizzie came with his fingers on her clit and one arm banded like steel behind her back, holding her in place as she twitched and bucked against him. He followed soon after, thrusting up into her, his face pressed into the hollow of her throat. 

For a few long moments they held each other: cheeks pressed to shoulders, hands gripping skin. Eventually sweat cooled and Lizzie started to shiver, sliding off Tommy and scurrying down the hallway to the little toilet. Her teeth were chattering by the time she made it back to Tom’s room- a fire hadn’t been lit in the house in a long, long time. 

“Come here,” he said, leaning up to press a kiss to Lizzie’s shoulder as she clambered over him to fit herself into the space between his body and the wall. The sheets were rough and familiar, and Tommy was warm. He was propped up against the wall, one thin, blue-striped pillow folded behind his back, and Lizzie curved herself into him: her head on his shoulder, one arm over his stomach, her thigh across his. 

“Do you miss it?” she asked. 

Tommy glanced down at her, and then back at the opposite wall. “No,” he said tersely. 

“Hmm. Neither do I.”

He traced whorling patterns along the skin of her arm, unable to fully relax even in bed. 

“Do you regret it?” With that one question she broke their truce; their game of make-believe. What she was really asking was,  _ Do you regret me?  _

“No,” he said again. And then, more softly. “No. Sometimes… you’ll come see me in the office, or I’ll come home and find you at lessons with Charlie, and I’m so thankful it’s you.” The addendum,  _ If it couldn’t be Grace,  _ was unspoken as well. 

Lizzie turned her head to press a kiss to the skin of his shoulder. He didn’t need to ask if she regretted it. They both knew the answer to that. So they sat curled together in the quiet of Small Heath, neither of them quite ready to surrender themselves to sleep. 

“I used to-” he swallowed, cleared his throat. “I used to lie here and dream about the trenches. About Germans breaking through that wall.” He jerked his chin towards the opposite side of the room.

Lizzie didn’t move. She didn’t speak. She didn’t do anything that might draw attention to herself. 

“I thought they’d fade. The… dreams, or whatever the fuck they are.” He huffed a quiet, mirthless laugh. “They haven’t. They’ve only grown. And there are still mornings when I wake up and I want to fucking die. It would be so much simpler, and I can’t, I know I can’t.”

Lizzie was crying. Crying, and trying not to, because he would only resent her for her tears. 

He didn’t look down at her, and he didn’t stop talking. “And so I hate you, because you’re one of the reasons that I can’t die that day. And- fuck, Lizzie, I’m always going to be like this. I think I always fucking am. And so I can’t promise you that things will get better. I’m not going to fucking change. But I don’t hate you. It’s never real. Never true.”

He glanced down at her and sighed at her tears, wiping a few away with the pad of his thumb. “Not for me,” he said roughly. 

Tommy turned back to the wall, his eyes tired. “I just- fuck. Fuck, I guess I’m fucking sorry, Lizzie.”

She jerked in surprise, and he smoothed a hand down her spine, up and down, his skin rough and warm and welcome against hers. 

“Yeah,” he said, softer now. “For everything I’ve fucking put you through, and the shit that I know is coming. I just wanted you to know that. That I can’t hate you.”

He clicked off the lamp and rolled them over, tucking them under the thin covers. Lizzie shivered as she was pressed against a new patch of cold mattress, and Tommy reached over her waist to take her hand in his. 

It wasn’t a declaration of love. It was far from it… and yet he’d still given her words she was confident he hadn’t given another woman in a long, long time.  _ I’m sorry.  _

She didn’t want his apologies. She’d stopped hoping for his love. No, Lizzie could be content with this: with friendship, with his body, with his respect. She’d been right: deep down inside, Tommy Shelby had a heart. 

“I don’t hate you either,” she whispered, letting her eyes fall shut. “I don’t think I could.”

(Even when she’d pointed a gun at his head and told him to leave his own house, she’d loved him. She’d been furious with him because every day, she’d been forced to watch him want to die, because he endangered their children, because no matter what happened, nothing could pierce through the numbness that haunted Tommy like ghosts.)

“I know, sweetheart,” he told her as she went boneless against him. “I know.”

~~~

It had snuck up on him, these feelings for Lizzie. 

They lay curled in his old bed above a half-abandoned Burmingham street, Lizzie soft and trusting and sleeping against him. He didn’t love her the way he’d loved Grace. (The way he still loved Grace.) He knew he never would. 

He knew there would be other women. There would be other schemes, and they would hurt her. There would be betrayals, big and small. He’d use her again. They both understood it. 

And yet under all that heartbreak and treachery, there was some part of him that wanted her. Not just for her submission to him in bed, not just because he’d realized that killing her love for him would mean killing her, not just because his children saw her as mum. 

If he outlived his enemies, she was the person he wanted to grow old with. She was the person he wanted to hold at the end of the day whenever he dragged himself home from his wanderings. He was done trying to analyze it, done telling himself that one of them would see reason eventually. He was comfortable with her, and she needed him. 

For now, though, his head blissfully quiet, and that was enough. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It isn't a happily ever after, but I think both Tommy and Lizzie would be more than thankful for a "happy for now". 
> 
> Something that I've learned as I've gotten older is that no romantic relationship feels the same. (Honestly, no friendship is the same, either.) The way I love one partner doesn't feel the same as the way I love another partner, and that's alright. Love isn't a resource of scarcity, and it doesn't always need to be the same. How boring would that be? I think it's a lesson that Tommy is learning, too. He isn't going to feel that obsessive, possessive love he felt for Grace. I think if (when???) he comes to love Lizzie, it'll be a longer, quieter burn.


End file.
